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Evelyn Waugh

Page 11

by Philip Eade


  Evelyn demanded complete dedication from those to whom he gave affection – as with his lopsided friendship with his Lancing disciple Dudley Carew – and for a time he expected Pares to accompany him on his regular benders at the Hypocrites’ and elsewhere. To begin with Pares meekly complied, even going so far as to speak at the Union in favour of drunkenness, but it soon became evident that he had neither the inclination nor the constitution for it. Moreover, despite his ‘gift for absurdity and frivolity’, as an article in The Isis recorded,39 Pares was always far more studious than Evelyn. Eventually, as Evelyn recalled, he was ‘rescued from bohemia and preserved for a life of scholarship’. He subsequently took a First, became a don and wrote a series of books on the eighteenth-century West Indian sugar trade as impenetrable as they were magisterial.

  His saviour from Evelyn was the Dean of Balliol, F. F. ‘Sligger’ Urquhart, who lured him into his more sober salon, thereby earning Evelyn’s lasting contempt. Towards the end of the spring term of 1923, another member of Sligger’s circle, Cyril Connolly, admitted to being ‘rather gone’ on Pares. Despite Pares’s promise to Evelyn that he would be ‘yours for three years or ad nauseam’40 he and Connolly were soon to be seen walking around the colleges together arm in arm. Evelyn felt sufficiently betrayed to complain later of having been ‘cuckolded by Connolly’.41

  The nature of Evelyn’s love affair with Pares is difficult to define at this distance, although Evelyn’s Hertford friend Tony Bushell was adamant that Evelyn’s fastidiousness would have precluded a physical affair. ‘The idea is preposterous,’ Bushell scoffed in a television interview. ‘Absolutely not possible, and I know.’42 Christopher Hollis remembered Evelyn telling him that his affections at that time were ‘much more romantic than carnal’.43 Harold Acton also tended to the view that the relationship was ‘idyllically platonic’,44 although he may have preferred to think that given his own unrequited crush on Evelyn.

  If there really was no physical element, it might seem odd that Evelyn himself should have referred to the affair as homosexual to Nancy Mitford – unless he was trying to impress her with what an intrepid young libertine he had been. In letters to Carew at the time Evelyn admitted that he had been ‘incredibly depraved morally’ and also that ‘my diary for the period is destroyed’.45 This seems to be the only evidence that he kept a diary during his time at Oxford, however in his future life Evelyn habitually destroyed his diary covering times of greatest emotional upheaval. All the indications are that Pares’s abandonment of him was more wounding than Evelyn was prepared to let on, and the painful end of the affair can be said to have given rise to the theme of faithlessness that would recur throughout his young life and again and again in his fiction.

  * * *

  In his third term at Oxford, Evelyn had moved to larger rooms on the ground floor of Hertford’s front quad. In Brideshead, Charles Ryder’s priggish cousin Jasper warns him: ‘I’ve seen many a man ruined through having ground-floor rooms in the front quad. People start dropping in … you start giving them sherry. Before you know where you are, you’ve opened a free bar for all the undesirables of the college.’46

  This certainly reflected Evelyn’s own experience, just as Charles’s first encounter with Sebastian recalled an evening when members of the Bullingdon came roaring out of Terence Greenidge’s rooms and rushed across the quad to get back to Christ Church before the Great Bell stopped ringing. ‘But there was a straggler,’ remembered Bushell, ‘and about the middle of the quad he turned away from the rest of them and staggered over towards Evelyn’s room where he was sick through the window.’47

  His new rooms soon became the epicentre of the self-elected ‘Hertford underworld’, whose chief protagonists were Evelyn, Greenidge, Tony Bushell, the budding actor who had come second to Evelyn in Hertford’s history scholarship exam, and Evelyn’s Lancing friend Philip Machin. Most days at lunchtime they gathered in Evelyn’s rooms for bread and cheese and plenty of beer. When his old Lancing friend Preters Molson was invited he sniffed, ‘I usually prefer to have a hot lunch,’ thereby lumbering himself with a new nickname.

  ‘Hot Lunch’ Molson later remembered being shocked at Evelyn’s wild and irresponsible behaviour at these lunches. Tony Bushell recalled that at Evelyn ‘always drank a good deal’ at these events, ‘a good deal’. Starting with a glass or two of Sandeman’s Brown Bang, a heavy, glutinous sherry, he would then go on to beer and in the afternoon, while Bushell and the other athletes went off to play games, he ‘just went on drinking’. By five o’clock, when the games players had returned and were eating their anchovy toast in the JCR, Evelyn would often be completely sozzled, ‘purple in the face with blotches on the backs of his hands’. Not infrequently he would then carry on drinking throughout the evening.

  Bushell recalled him as ‘a wonderful drunk … a marvellous drunk. Wonderful company, witty, funny, wildly funny’.48 Others, though, had less wonderful experiences. Tamara Abelson, the daughter of an émigré former official in the Tsar’s treasury and one of very few girls at the university in those days, made friends with Evelyn during long walks across the meadows with her Alsatian dog, Ghost. One day Evelyn turned up ‘unpleasantly drunk,’ Tamara recalled, ‘rude and violent’, and she threatened to cut him off for ever if he went to see her like that again. He never did, although with others his roistering continued unabated and he often became objectionable.

  Even at the Hypocrites’, never noted for its sobriety, Evelyn’s behaviour occasionally went too far. On Anthony Powell’s first visit there in the autumn of 1923, towards the end of Evelyn’s second year, he learned that Evelyn had been banned ‘for having smashed up a good deal of the Club’s furniture with the heavy stick he always carried’.49

  By this time, Evelyn had introduced another new friend to the Hypocrites’, Harold Acton, whom he had met at the Newman Society, listening to a talk by G. K. Chesterton (evidence, incidentally, that Evelyn remained intellectually interested in religion even if he no longer went to chapel). By some distance the most significant influence on Evelyn’s social and artistic development at Oxford – as he later acknowledged by dedicating Decline and Fall ‘in homage and affection’ to him – Acton was considered by far the most striking and promising student of their era,* although his renown has not lasted anything like as well as that of Evelyn and several other protégés.

  The son of an Italianized English father and an immensely rich American mother (Acton himself left $500 million when he died in 1994), Acton had grown up at a magnificent Florentine villa before being packed off to prep school in Berkshire, where he founded a precocious magazine on art and fashion and regarded standing on chairs and reciting poetry as a perfectly normal way of making new friends.50

  At Eton he fell in with another unashamedly camp and rich half-American, Brian Howard, with whom he collaborated to produce the Eton Candle magazine with shocking pink wrappers, yellow endpapers and contributions from Max Beerbohm, Aldous Huxley (then a young beak at the school) and the Sitwells. Their Eton Society of Arts numbered several of Evelyn’s future Oxford cronies, among them Hugh Lygon, who Anthony Powell assumed owed his membership to an unrequited ‘tendresse’ felt for him by either Brian Howard or Robert Byron rather than to his intellect, which was far from remarkable.51

  When Acton arrived at Christ Church in the Michaelmas term of 1922, he painted his gloomy Gothic rooms bright yellow and festooned them with artificial flowers and wax fruit. Tall, plumpish, with a domed forehead, long black side-whiskers and oriental-looking eyes, he was an easily recognisable figure ‘shouldering and mincing his way’ about Oxford. Familiar accoutrements included grey bowler hat, black stock, pleated mauve trousers as wide as a skirt (the so-called Oxford bags which he popularised)† and tightly rolled umbrella.52 Their near-contemporary John Rothenstein, later director of the Tate Gallery, recalled a near-collision with Evelyn and Acton on an Oxford street corner, ‘two figures with scarves flying in the wind, one fair, shortish, with fanatical eye
s set wide apart [Evelyn]; the other tall, dark, with an expression of pride oddly blended with courtliness’.53

  Like Anthony Blanche in Brideshead, whose creation (‘part Gallic, part Yankee, part, perhaps, Jew; wholly exotic’) owed an equal amount to Brian Howard, Acton declaimed Eliot’s The Waste Land through a megaphone from his balcony to puzzled passers-by; and when confronted by a gang of hearty rugger players, he exclaimed to a fellow aesthete: ‘Oh my de-ah, we are so dec-a-dent and they are so in-no-cent.’ After coming down with a cold, he wailed: ‘Oh, my de-ah, I’ve been so mis-er-able a-all the day.’54

  Acton’s affectations – he later described his recreations in Who’s Who as ‘hunting – Philistines’ – attracted occasional hostility, most notably when, in the summer of 1923, a band of ‘big ruff animal louts’, as he described them, smashed his window with a poker. ‘I, tucked up in bed and contemplating the reflection of Luna on my walls, was immersed under showers of myriad particles of split glass, my head powdered glass-dust and my possessions vitrified.’55 But by the time he left Oxford, when he was recognised as the pre-eminent figure in the artistic life of the university, he had won over even the athletes.

  He and Evelyn were unlikely soulmates, however Evelyn was fascinated by Acton’s exotic background and enthusiasms and relished their shared ‘zest for the variety and absurdity of life opening to us; a veneration for (not the same) artists, a scorn for the bogus’. It was Acton who steered him away from the fusty Francis Crease, ‘that nice old maid’ as Acton called him,56 whom Evelyn had continued to see during the holidays, and towards such prophets of modernism as T. S. Eliot and Gertrude Stein. In June 1923 he took him to the bizarre, under-rehearsed yet to Evelyn captivating first public showing of Edith Sitwell’s Façade at the Aeolian Hall in London, where one uncomprehending critic complained of the poet reciting ‘drivel through a megaphone’. Later that evening, at an after-party at Osbert Sitwell’s house in Carlyle Square, Evelyn met Lytton Strachey and Clive Bell; however it was the Sitwells whom he really aspired to know, seeing them as torchbearers of the avant-garde and an inspiration to all those wishing to blaze a new artistic trail. They ‘radiated an aura of high spirits, elegance, impudence, unpredictability, above all sheer enjoyment,’ he later wrote. ‘They declared war on dullness.’57

  For his part, Acton was drawn to what he called Evelyn’s ‘friskiness’. More awkwardly, he also appears to have found him physically attractive – he described him achingly in his memoir as ‘a prancing faun, thinly disguised by conventional apparel. His wide-apart eyes, always ready to be startled under raised eyebrows, the curved sensual lips, the hyacinthe locks of hair … So demure and yet so wild!’58 In the same book, Acton painted himself as a young Casanova, proudly recalling numerous ‘bygone loves’ at Oxford and of having ‘kindled flames in Elgin marble breasts’ and enjoyed ‘ecstacies on the Thames and at Thame … I have not forgotten a single kiss …’59 Yet if he ever did make overtures to Evelyn the signs are that he was rejected, one letter from that time hinting at jealousy of Evelyn’s more passionate friendships: ‘Please forgive me if I said that about “R. I. P.” [Richard Pares] last night,’ wrote Acton. ‘Truth will out, I suppose, in spite of the fact that I had tried hard not to hurt your feelings or to “sneer” … You are, as I have said before, a faun, but I had never credited you with the fantastic whimsies of a faun, nor with the enigmas of one; now I do. Besides it is rather elegant to have an unhappy love affair …’60

  According to Evelyn, Acton harboured similarly unrequited feelings for the ‘strikingly handsome hearty’61 – presumably Tony Bushell – who unwittingly drew him almost daily to Evelyn’s offal lunches in his rooms at Hertford. While everyone else drank beer, Acton ‘would sip water and gaze ardently at the inaccessible young athlete’.62* In return Acton gave many lunch parties of his own in his rooms at Christ Church where Evelyn made several long-lasting friendships.

  Among these were three who had been at prep school with Acton as well as Eton – Mark Ogilvie-Grant, the ‘reckless roof-climber’ Billy Clonmore, who as an undergraduate held a supper party on the roof of an Oxford church and later became a priest, and the ‘secretly studious’ David Talbot Rice who, almost uniquely among their peer group at Oxford, went out with a student of the opposite sex, Evelyn’s friend Tamara Abelson, whom he later married.

  With the new Michaelmas intake of 1923, Evelyn’s circle expanded to include several more of what was an exceptionally talented generation of Etonians – Anthony Powell, Oliver Messel, Henry Yorke (the novelist Henry Green), Robert Byron, who belied his future calling by yelling ‘Down with abroad!’ whenever travel was mentioned, and Brian Howard, who even his close school friend and collaborator Harold Acton admitted was ‘completely amoral’.63 Later immortalised as Ambrose Silk in Put Out More Flags as well as Anthony Blanche in Brideshead, Howard was one of those whom Evelyn ‘did not greatly like’ but ‘in my innocence, I was proud to know’.

  He felt much the same way about two other Oxford contemporaries, both at Balliol, the raffish yet tediously didactic Peter Rodd, who later married Nancy Mitford, and Nancy’s more wayward cousin ‘Baz’ Murray, whom Evelyn deemed ‘a satanic young man’.64 Evelyn later fused several of their least appealing traits in the character of Basil Seal, his Balliol-educated anti-hero in Black Mischief and Put Out More Flags. Murray was renowned at Oxford for his intellectual brilliance (he was the son of a well-known Classics don and himself a scholar), but equally for his casual approach to sex, money and personal hygiene. Like Basil Seal he later covered the Spanish Civil War as a journalist (Evelyn added ‘gunrunner’)65 on the Republican side and died there in the kind of bizarre circumstances that might easily have featured in an early Waugh novel – having caught a deadly virus from a female ape he had bought in Valencia docks and reportedly cavorted with in his hotel room in a state of drunken disillusionment after a series of failed love affairs.66

  Fifteen years previously, at Oxford, it was Murray who had helped F. A. Philbrick (later a chemistry beak at Rugby) to rough up Evelyn in retaliation for a campaign of teasing after Philbrick admitted to having rather enjoyed beating smaller boys at school – the persecution culminated when a film was shown with a scene of a man being flogged and the whole cinema erupted in a loud chant of Philbrick’s name. Evelyn later took his revenge by attaching Philbrick’s name to a series of disreputable characters in his early fiction.

  Yet none of these enmities came close to that which Evelyn felt towards his Hertford history tutor, C. R. M. F. Cruttwell, for whom he developed a dislike that was, as his brother Alec recalled, ‘mutual, instinctive and irrational as love’.67 Seen by his fellow dons as a rather sad and lonely bachelor, Cruttwell disguised his painful shyness behind a gruff and uncompromising manner.68 Even Evelyn later conceded that he was probably a ‘wreck of the war’, yet he could not resist mocking his ‘petulant baby’ face, his pipe ‘usually attached to his blubber-lips by a thread of slime’. ‘As he removed the stem,’ Evelyn went on, ‘waving it to emphasise his indistinct speech, this glittering connection extended until finally it broke leaving a dribble on his chin. When he spoke to me I found myself so distracted by the speculation of how far this line could be attenuated that I was often inattentive to his words.’

  At Oxford Evelyn mercilessly caricatured ‘Crutters’ in student magazines and told anyone who would listen about the perversions he supposedly got up to with his dog. ‘Now he’s raping the poor brute,’ he whispered to his cousin Claud Cockburn as they listened to the strange sounds coming from the rooms above Evelyn’s, ‘and at this hour in the morning!’69

  Evelyn’s initial gripe with Cruttwell was the don’s frenzied insistence that Evelyn fulfil his obligations as Hertford’s first history scholar, a demand which Evelyn early made clear his intention to ignore, seeing his scholarship as a ‘reward for work done, not as the earnest of work to come’,70 and maintaining later that while he knew all about his Oxford friends’ political and religious opinio
ns, love affairs, finances, etcetera, he would have ‘thought it indelicate to inquire what school they were reading’.71 However he also affected to take against Cruttwell’s undisguised misogyny (he called female dons ‘drabs’ or, if they were emotional, ‘breastheavers’) and his propensity to bully those weaker than himself.

  Evelyn famously attached Cruttwell’s name to an unsavoury character in each of his first five novels and seems to have resolved to pursue the feud indefinitely after Cruttwell’s ‘gratuitously derogatory’ letters to Evelyn’s first mother-in-law, Lady Burghclere, shortly before his marriage in 1930.

  Long after both Cruttwell and Evelyn were dead, Evelyn’s son Auberon cheerfully seized any opportunity to revive the vendetta. When the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography published an entry on Cruttwell which recorded, besides his various achievements as a historian, his ‘passion for flowers and for country life’, Auberon rebuked the publishers for omitting to mention ‘the peculiarity for which he was much more widely suspected’. (Their solution was simply to remove the reference to flowers from subsequent editions.) In 2003, at an Evelyn Waugh centenary dinner at Hertford, Auberon’s son Alexander surprised the assembled scholars by calling on them to raise their glasses to Cruttwell, ‘that he may forever be remembered as a dog sodomist and a total shit’.72

  * Douglas Woodruff, later editor of The Tablet, had recruited Evelyn to the debating chamber as one of the Conservatives, at that time outnumbered by the Liberal contingent. ‘I proclaimed myself a Tory but could not have defined Tory policy on any current topic.’ (A Little Learning, p. 183.) He belonged to the Oxford Carlton Club and the smaller Chatham.

  † Evelyn did however enter himself for the Union elections in June 1923, coming last with twenty-five votes. His friend Christopher Hollis was elected president with 309.

 

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